Czech athletes heading to the Winter Olympics will not be given a special plane, reportedly because of tensions with Russia
Czech athletes will not be afforded the luxury of a special plane to travel to the Winter Olympics in Beijing because of tensions with Russia, reports have claimed.
The chairman of the Czech Olympic Committee, Jiri Kejval, is said to have asked the government to provide an aircraft for the country’s winter sporting elite to head the Beijing Games, which formally get underway on February 4.
But according to Kejval, the government rejected the request for reasons related to Russia – and more specifically that arranging a stopover on the way to China might be an issue.
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“At the last meeting in mid-December, we received information that when the aircraft belongs to the Ministry of Defense and it is actually a NATO aircraft and the Czech Republic has the relations with Russia that it has, there is a high probability that we will not get visas to make a stopover,” Kejval told Czech news outlet Seznam.
“The plane is not able to fly [the distance] all at once. Unfortunately, we cannot risk whether Russian officials will be nice to us or not.”
Czech Olympians will now have to use a Korean Air flight which will not need to make a stopover, although the option is more expensive.